Peter turns on the heel of his foot quickly. Okay, he was trying to use Hiro's power at Claude's behest but this wasn't where he was trying to go. At least he's been here before and he knows what to expect with a sigh he starts walking down the street toward the coffee shop.

Peter grins a little crookedly and nods. "Yeah. I can imagine. I'm not crazy about being in front of the press either." Occasionally being a Petrelli warrants it but Peter tries to fade into the background as much as possible.

He finishes up his coffee and watches her for a second. He's still got the ghost of that crooked smile on his face. It's kind of hard not to grin when he looks at her. Claire is someone he saved, someone he helped with these powers. "You sure you don't mind sharing an apartment with me. I'm a good room mate. I promise."

He's really not. He's a packrat and while everything has it's place it's not exactly the most logical place. It's a place that Peter thinks makes sense. Tennis balls belong on desks so that he can throw them against walls when he's thinking. Books belong in piles beside the bed so he can read while he's in bed. Comics belong on coffee tables so he can read them in on the couch instead of going across to a shelf to get them. Jeans can go over a chair so he can grab them in the morning.

"Definitely," Claire responds without missing a beat, a bright smile lighting up her face. Even though they're supposedly even now as far as rescuing goes with the way he was talking about her ability saving his life, she can't help but enjoy getting to go to his rescue in even the most insignificant of ways.

"Honestly? You could be the worst roommate in the world and I'd still want you there. It can get creepy being alone in an apartment at night." She shrugs a little at the admission, which is pretty difficult to make with the big, tough girl image she's been trying to keep up all this time. But, she feels pretty safe dropping it around Peter, so she just sets to work on finishing her pastry and her hot chocolate.

That makes him feel a lot better about barging in on her living space and she'll get no judgment from him for letting the tough girl image slip. Everybody needs someone they can let their guard down with sometimes.

"Yeah, it took me a while to get used to living by myself when I first moved out. You're used to so much sound and knowing that the creaking floorboard is probably someone in your family. When you're alone all you can think is 'there was no one to make that floorboard creak'."

"Exactly. Which means it's either someone who's not supposed to be there or, like … I don't know, a ghost or something. I don't know which would be worse, honestly." She laughs at her own joke and shakes her head a little, propping one elbow up on the table so she can rest her chin in her hand.

"Besides," she shrugs casually, wearing a teasing smirk. "If you move in, it'll officially become your job to level the washing machine when it starts rattling and snake the drain and all that fun stuff."

"Hey," she says teasingly, trying to force the smile out of her face and pretend she's being serious but failing miserably, "maintenance is no laughing matter. You've got to earn your keep -- you should be taking your manly duty more seriously."

Yeah, there was definitely no hope of keeping that smile down. She bursts out laughing as well, shaking her head.

The smile spreads infectiously over her face and she raises her cocoa mug to try and hide it, though that's pretty much a useless effort. Can't blame a girl for trying. She fixes him with a shy look, forcing her lips to curl in a wry kind of teasing smirk.

"Relax, I'm not going to ban you from smiling. I'm not a slave driver." The smirk became something of a more genuine, quiet smile and she shrugged a shoulder. "You're pretty much all I've got here. I'd say that kind of entails encouraging the whole smile thing."

"I'm glad you're here," she admits a little quietly. "I mean, not that you got stuck here, just ... you know, having you around. I didn't really think I'd get the chance to see you again." Suddenly, like she's pulling herself out of a kind of haze that won over her while she was addressing him, she pushes her chair out.

"Come on, I'll show you around. You can tell me more about all of the people you've met, and I'll tell you more about Roanoake." It sounds fair enough to her, anyway, so she stands up and pushes her chair in. "I'm kind of jealous, honestly. You're the only person I've met who can -- you know."

Other than Sylar, of course. But talking about him wasn't on the top of her to-do list. In fact, she avoided thinking about that at all costs.

Peter gets up just after her, still absorbing and thinking about what she'd said. Clearly she's feeling really alone and had been even before coming here. After a moment he reaches and takes her hand lightly in his. It's an attempt to help her feel a little bit less lonely.

"Trust me. If you'd met Claude you wouldn't be jealous," he jokes with her. "I got lucky. New York City gets a lot of visitors."

When his hand grabbed hers, her eyes widened and immediately she looked down as if she expected some third party to be responsible. He couldn't seriously be -- but he was. Her gaze dragged up his arm slowly and fixed on his face for a minute, scrutinizing. Then, she quickly just turned her head away, satisfaction working into the smile that monopolized her face, reaching her eyes as she led him down the street towards where she'd been staying.

"Hey, I wish I had a friend who'd throw me off. Mine just sits at the bottom and films it." There was teasing in her tone but she quickly realized that it wasn't something she'd meant to share. Talking to Peter was too easy and her expression turned from wryly curved smile to distracted surprise with herself and then an evasive duck of her head. She cleared her throat.

"So, what's New York like, anyway? I've never been." A shrug. "Granted, there are a lot of places I've never been ... I guess that's probably why this whole thing doesn't bug me too badly."

She was probably reading more into it than he meant. Sure she's pretty and it's appealing that he can talk about his powers and hers with her without her looking at him like he's insane. She's also young. Right now the hand holding was strictly a comfort thing--right? Definitely. Absolutely. Okay well...no he couldn't.

"Testing your power out?" It was said with some concern because the idea of her killing herself over and over isn't appealing but it was also said with a teasing tone. He understood needing to know about your power, how far you could push it and how you could control it or couldn't. It wasn't something you wanted to learned something new about during a crucial, crisis time.

"Big. Busy. There's so many people that you can just disappear into a crowd. I like that. There's always something to do, something new to see. And if you need to get away, there are a million roof tops that you can be all alone on. No one ever looks up. I guess I was lucky. As a Petrelli I got to go to a lot of places. New York City is still my favorite though."

His question about testing her power got a sheepish nod. It wasn't really something she was prepared to discuss at length -- she didn't like bragging about the kind of issues it obviously proved she had that she would throw herself off a gravel plant and see what happened, or tell her friend to hit her with his car. Or to drive Brody Mitchum's car into a wall at seventy miles per hour. But, this was Peter. Her hero. Honesty was never a question with Peter, it was a given.

"It was just something I had to do," she confessed in a quiet tone, before latching onto the change of topic to get away from that. Freak standards were pretty complicated when they were both pretty freaky, all things considered, but that didn't mean she was any less worried about what he might think of her if he decided she was just some loser suicidal teenager.

"Petrelli?" She shook her head, not knowing quite what that entailed. She was pretty well-versed in state and national government, but only state for where she lived. Which was decidedly pretty far from New York, so knowing that Nathan was running for that seat was a little beyond her knowledge. Particularly considering she couldn't even vote yet.

"Maybe you can take me sometime and I can see it. I mean, you live there, right? So, I could stay with you or something." By the sound of it, the prospect excited her -- getting away the nagging, prying eyes of people at Union Wells? Definitely not something she'd say no to at this point. The TV cameras were a nightmare, but worse were her fellow students. With the exception of Zach, none of them seemed able to look at her the same way.

"To see how far it would go." He made it a statement, almost an end to her sentence rather than a question. He did get it and he would have said that in some part it was human nature. When he spoke again, his voice was concerned. Whether Claire liked it or not, he felt responsible for her now. She was his cheerleader and he saved her. She had to stay saved now. "You should be careful though. Okay?" He squeezed her hand lightly when he said it.

"Nathan is running for Senator," Peter explained. He didn't judge her for not knowing. He didn't honestly pay much attention to politics until Nathan got involved. "There's a lot of press and media around right now."

He could hear the excitement in her voice and nodded. He couldn't deny her that. Besides it was good for a teenager to see the world, right? And New York City had a lot of the world in it. "As long as your Dad says it's okay, you can come for a couple of weeks in the summer. If we time it right I'll be out of work and I can show you around."